Part Five: Violence (1990-2000)

Chapter 21: A Challenge for a Young Lawyer

One day in THE SPRING of 1990, a new staffer in the offices of the Senate Judiciary Committee, just off the marble halls of the Dirksen Building and a short walk from the marble dome of the Capitol, received a surprise project from her boss, Senator Joseph Biden. He wanted her to figure out what Congress should do to reduce violent crimes against women.

Victoria Nourse, the new staffer, was 31 years old and six years out of law school. Except for being the only woman lawyer in her section of the judiciary committee, she wondered what in her background prepared her for this job. . . .

Nourse started moving from casebook to law journal to practitioner's manual, back and forth across the Law Library Reading Room of the Library of Congress. Starting from scratch, she was giving herself a course on women in the law. Nourse glanced at the book she would have read if she had studied with Professor Kay at Berkeley: Sex-Based Discrimination, the 1,001-page third edition of a textbook whose first edition Kay had begun planning with Ginsburg in 1971 and that appeared for the first time in 1974. Nourse read through back issues of early women's law journals, particularly the first, the Women's Rights Law Reporter, started by Ginsburg's students at Rutgers in 1971. There she could read about early gender battles as described by their litigators: Ginsburg on Reed and Frontiero, Wendy Williams on Aiello.

Multiple articles traced the descent of American rape law from 17th-century formulations of British Common Law. Often the law harked back to a comment by Britain's Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale, who died in 1676. A rape accusation, said Hale, is "easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent." . . .

Senator Joseph Biden introduced the "Violence Against Women Act" on June 19, 1990, followed by a one-day hearing. The proposed act contained more than just the civil rights section that Nourse had pondered at the law library.

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[This is the opening of Part Five of Fred Strebeigh, Equal: Women Reshape American Law (W. W. Norton, 2009), listed in the Norton catalog and also at Amazon.com.]

A note on this website for Equal: Women Reshape American Law

As of May 2012, Microsoft has ended its long-running website service called Microsoft Office Live, on which I built this site, www.EqualWomen.com. I am now rebuilding the site on a new website service, but for a while this site may remain in progress.